Australian teachers and policymakers will have their hearts in their mouths as this year’s National Assessment Program (NAPLAN) tests get underway on Wednesday, March 12.
In 2023 and again last year, NAPLAN scores showed a third of Australian school students were performing below literacy and numeracy benchmarks.
After a change to the testing made no difference to last year’s results, teachers had had enough. Unions argued throughout 2024 that the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS)—the minimum amount required to meet the needs of students—was insufficient and that new plans outlined under the Better and Fairer Schools Funding Agreement would only entrench an already unequal education system.
The Australian Education Union said, “a systemic failure of governments to provide adequate funding has had a devastating impact on the teaching profession—escalating workloads and creating a chronic workforce shortage.”
While other states agreed to the new SRS over the course of 2024, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and NSW held out until December before signing interim one-year bilateral agreements with the Federal Government. They want to receive a full 25% Commonwealth contribution to the SRS, rather than the 22.5% proposed.
It’s against this backdrop—poor standards of literacy, a lack of funding, and a “chronic workforce shortage”—that NAPLAN results over the same period from a group of Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE) pilot schools demonstrate surprising, some might say even shocking, success.
Positives can be found
Julie Quinn, Australian Educational Director, Writer’s Toolbox said the Brisbane Catholic Education (BCE) pilot schools have been using an educational artificial intelligence (AI) tool to help students develop their writing skills.
“Unlike ChatGPT or other forms of AI, it doesn’t tell students what to write; it teaches them how to do so,” Quinn told The Educator.
“It is a structured programme delivered and modelled with explicit teaching—a composition skills approach which teaches style, form and structure, alongside sentence and paragraph formation and grammar.”
The application, Writer’s Toolbox, has been adopted by more than 650 schools globally.
The company has invested over $20m in its patented AI development over the past decade and has been recognised internationally, making the International Webby Awards Honours List for its intuitive design in 2021. In 2023, Writer’s Toolbox won the New Zealand Hi Tech Awards for the most innovative Hi-Tech Creative Technology Solution.
The eight Catholic (BCE) schools in Brisbane – with more than 5,803 students between them – have been using Writer’s Toolbox in a pilot since 2024, some even earlier. The results they’ve achieved have been collated and compared to the mean average results from across the state of Queensland.
Hard evidence
The program’s straight comparison of improvement between BCE pilot schools and others shows the BCE schools performing eight times better in NAPLAN tests than their state counterparts. This is a combination of all year levels: Year 3, Year 5, Year 7, and Year 9.
Tracking the progress of the same cohorts of students in Year 3 (2022) to Year 5 (2024) and Year 7 (2022) to Year 9 (2024) shows the BCE students in those years improved by 1.5 and 1.7 times their state peers, respectively.
St Columban’s College is an independent Catholic secondary day school for boys and girls in Caboolture, Queensland, which has been part of the pilot. It chose Writer’s Toolbox because of the success large local independent schools were having with the programme.
Michael Connolly, St Columban’s Principal, has 35 years teaching experience, 25 of which he’s spent at Deputy Principal or Principal level.
He says his school has seen outstanding results from the tool, with improvements in Year 9 and right across the school after just one year. He’s now got hard data to demonstrate the cost/benefits of the programme and argues the narrative about e-learning needs to change from cost to one of value delivered.
Connolly says he’s always looking for ways to support his staff and they’re “absolutely not threatened” by the program, because it provides a second pair of hands in the classroom. Teachers can ask students to use the educational AI program on their writing tasks until they’re ranking an 80 per cent writing strength before submitting them for review. He says the application can give each learner a level of personalised feedback which teachers would struggle to do in the class time available.
What about our boys?
Quinn said there is a pattern from Writer’s Toolbox’s pilot results which goes beyond the pilot of BCE schools.
“Boys in particular respond well to the tool, with Year 9 boys in seven [boys-only] schools in Queensland using the program showing an improvement eight and a half times that of Year 9 boys in Queensland schools generally,” Quinn said.
“Nationwide, Year 9 boys have not been performing well, and there’s concern from think tanks and academics about their outcomes.”
Last year’s results showed around 45% of Year 9 boys still needed additional support or their skills were “developing”.
“This terminology, from the Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA), is what most of us would politely call ‘not achieved’,” Quinn said.
“The long-term impact of these statistics is what’s really worrying. There’s a phenomenon known as the ‘Matthew effect,’ which shows that those who do well early on continue to do so, and those who don’t, languish.”
Quinn noted that these are the boys most likely not to pursue tertiary study.
“According to a study by Georgetown University’s Centre on Education and the Workforce, the lifetime earnings gap between someone who completes a bachelor’s degree and someone who doesn’t is around 75% or USD$1.2m,” she said.
“That’s the difference between being a renter or a homeowner, and it doesn’t bode well for Australia’s future productivity.”